The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney

by Richard A. Lertzman

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  TO THE MEMORIES OF MICKEY ROONEY, ROBIN WILLIAMS, AND JOAN RIVERS

  We all die, but comedians, through their fleeting moments of glory, fearlessly seeking that one laugh, live forever.

  They take us where we need to go even if we don’t want to go there.

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Foreword by Roger Kahn

  Introduction by Jeanine Basinger

  Prologue: The Last Movie

  1: Born in a Trunk

  2: Mickey McGuire

  3: Ma Lawlor and Universal Studios

  4: Selznick Rescues Mickey: The Start at MGM

  5: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

  6: The Gates of Hell

  7: Mickey and the Lion

  8: The Make-Believe World of Andy Hardy’s America

  9: Mickey and Judy and the MGM Backyard Musicals

  10: Mickey Goes Wild

  11: Ava

  12: The First Divorce

  13: Mickey and the Pit Bull

  14: Greetings

  15: Rooney Inc.

  16: The Lion Strikes Back

  17: The Mick, the Duke, and the Deuce in the Coconut

  18: Bigamy and Barbara Ann

  19: The Mickey Jinx and the Murder in Brentwood

  20: Career Swings

  21: The Seventies: Aftermath of Tragedy

  22: Escape from Los Angeles

  23: Sugar Babies

  24: Mickey’s Back: The Oscars, and the Emmys, and Bill

  25: Going Ungently into That Good Night

  26: Time May Lie Heavy Between

  27: The Last Years

  28: His Revels Are Now Ended

  29: It’s a Wrap

  Afterword by Paul Petersen

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  Appendix: Mickey Rooney Filmography and Credits (in Chronological Order)

  About Richard A. Lertzman and William J. Birnes

  Notes

  Index

  I was a fourteen-year-old boy for thirty years.

  —MICKEY ROONEY

  I don’t want to hurt him, poor darling. He ain’t got a fucking cent. He’s been raked over the coals for millions by those goddamn wives he kept getting married to after me. What is it they say? “The fucking you get for the fucking you got?”

  —AVA GARDNER

  Foreword by Roger Kahn

  Mickey Rooney was his own sort of enigma, reinventing himself as the situation demanded. I should know, because I was one of his first biographers. Now Bill Birnes and Rick Lertzman have taken on this task in the wake of Mickey’s passing, in a thorough look at not only the life of Mickey Rooney, but at his times as well.

  My introduction to Mickey was precipitated by a series of profiles I had written. One of them, a very popular article for The Saturday Evening Post, was based on a day with Robert Frost. My editors asked me, “What would you like to do next?” I said that I’d like to do one on Sean O’Casey, but they told me that they didn’t believe too many people in Kansas City would care for an article on a left-wing Irish playwright. They asked, “How about Jackie Cooper?” So I went to Jackie Cooper, who said he would cooperate only if he were part of the byline; we gave it to him. The piece was called, “Unfortunately, I Was Rich.” I didn’t love it because his lawyer gutted anything that had to do with Jackie’s issues with his biological father, which was sort of a key to his strange life, but other people liked it. It convinced the publisher that if I could work with Cooper, I could work with Mickey Rooney.

  There was a pretty good pot of money involved—for the 1960s. It was seventy-five thousand dollars for Rooney and me to split. I thought this fellow had an interesting life; he started working when he was barely two years old. I guess his first couple of years he just lay around the house. I met Mickey in an office building at the corner of Hollywood and Vine, with his lawyer, Dermot Long. Mickey came bouncing into the office and announced that the book “will be about a loud little guy who doesn’t want to be loud. It’s a story of a guy who thinks well twice a month. If I had gone slower, if the drinks had been lighter, and if the girls had been gentler, this would have been a much nicer story.”

  I liked his idea, and it seemed like a pretty good opening. We went on a bit. The publisher said that if I thought I could do it, I needed to write a presentation for a forty-minute meeting. I did, and they approved it—but then Rooney disappeared. Our first meeting, we went to Santa Anita Park racetrack and he said, “I’ll mark your card.” I thought he knew a great deal about the horses, but as it turned out, he didn’t. As soon as we got to the track, he’d asked, “Could you let me have six hundred dollars? I’ve got to settle with a guy in the next box.” So I gave him six hundred dollars. And he said, “Dermot will give it back to you. Dermot handles the money.” So I saw Dermot a couple of days later and asked for my six hundred dollars back. And he said, “I can’t do that. I’m operating under the thumb of the IRS, and they had to approve every check I write. And they won’t approve a check to pay off a debt at the racetrack.” Dermot, who always tried to be decent, said he could get it from one of Mickey’s performances in Vegas and write it off as an expense. So that was our beginning.

  At the track, Mickey had an intricate system that didn’t work very well. When he came to pick me up, he said he had a small car. I thought he meant it was a Corvette. He was actually driving a Corvair. A small car. From my place, he drove straight to a gas station to fill up. Immediately the attendant recognized him. He said, “Mickey Rooney, wow!” Mickey chuckled and he said, “A dollar’s worth please.” He turned to me and said, “It’s all these little cars will hold,” No. It was all he could afford. So we had a miscellaneous kind of a day.

  WHEN WE STARTED THE interview, I asked, “Will a tape recorder bother you?” He said no. Actually, it was the whole project that bothered him. Once he had Dermot Long deposit the publisher’s check, he disappeared. Every day, while he was physically in Encino, I would call Dermot who’d say, “He can’t see you today; he has to visit his in-laws,” or “He has to audition for a part,” or “He can’t see you today; he has a meeting at his church.” After two or three weeks of this, I called my agent and said forget it. My agent said, “You can’t. The publisher really wants the book. And if you back out now, you’re looking at litigation, and you’ll be in three-way litigation with the publisher and Rooney, and it will be a mess.” And I figured out that it would be a mess, so I continued my efforts, got nowhere, stayed in Hollywood at the Chateau Marmont, and did some other pieces, like one on director Stanley Kramer, who was an interesting fellow, and it made for a good piece. I did one on Joan Baez, who was obnoxious, and it didn’t make for a good piece. And then I said again we’d have to drop the Rooney book, but again I was warned of the litigation.

  Then I got to see him for bits and pieces of time. But there was never any serious talk. If there had been, I could have wrapped it up in three or four weeks. Instead, I had little smidgens of things. I was writing this under the threat of litigation, and saying to myself, “How did I get into this?” and thinking I was going to have to fire my agent, and having all sorts of diffuse thoughts occupy my head. So I wrote a draft of the first chapter. The Saturday Evening Post liked it very much and offered twenty-five thousand dollars.
At the time, Rooney was married to Barbara Thomason, his fifth wife. When I told Mickey about the fee, Barbara said, “I heard Cary Grant got a hundred and fifty thousand from The Saturday Evening Post.” I didn’t say, “Mickey isn’t Cary Grant,” but I tried to say, “Well, this is what the market is offering.” Mickey got very angry then and said, “Fuck ’em. They can’t have it.”

  It fell upon me to tell The Saturday Evening Post that he’d said no. They weren’t happy and thought that the twenty-five grand was a good offer, as did I. I kept kind of slogging along, and the publisher kept waiting. After a bit, I finally pieced together something, which was at best mediocre, because I was getting no cooperation. So I turned it in and I thought, good, now I’m done. But the publisher wanted more.

  So I went to a lawyer, a very good literary lawyer named Charles Rembar. He said, “From what you’re telling me, you’re going to have to sue these bastards.” Rembar said that it didn’t matter what you sued for; ultimately the judge decided what you’d get. Rembar said, “Do you want to sue for a million?” I said, “Sure.” So we sued for a million, and it had the effect that Rembar wanted, which was to get the attention of Rooney’s lawyer and Rooney. So then I went back to Rooney and got some more material, but I still didn’t have enough. The publisher was still pressing. Rembar told Rooney’s lawyer that I needed Rooney for two days, full time, with no distractions, no phones, no nothing. And if I had those two days, I could finish the research for the book. So I went out there, and Rooney asked, “Have you written anything?” and I said, “Yes.” And he said, “Let me read it.” So he started reading the draft aloud. I had used the word façade, and he read it as “fo-cade.” It turned out that he couldn’t really read very well. Everything was through the ear.

  He would make cracks. I asked him what his honeymoon with Ava was like. He said, “I played golf. I was looking at the wrong hole.” One-liners. Nothing substantial. I gathered that Ava had said that he was a pretty good lover. Mickey finally told me that he had been at the Hollywood Palladium with Ava when he went onstage and did a Lionel Barrymore imitation, played the drums and the trumpet, but ignored Ava. She went back to their home, which was a modest house in Stone Canyon. Rooney came home several hours afterward and jumped on her, and she looked at him and said, “ ‘If you ever knock me up, you little sonofabitch, I will kill you.’ I said what did you say? So she got up and headed toward the bathroom. And my God, Ava was a beautiful nude and she went to the bathroom and locked it. I pounded on the door and went to my knees and said, ‘Why Ava, Why?’ and I learned. She did not like to be ignored.”

  With gems like these, I slogged along, and had my attorney call Rooney’s again. And Rooney returned, but he spent his time reading drafts rather than giving me the information I needed. So at this point, my perspective was that nothing wonderful was going to come of it. I just wanted to finish it and get back to real writing. So I did a final draft and met the deadline of eighty thousand words, but it truly was not very deep and did not get to the core of the man. If there was a core of that man.

  In between, I wrote magazine stories. One was the story of the heavyweight championship fight in Miami between Floyd Patterson and Ingemar Johansson. It was a very good fight. When I got back, I told Rooney about the fight. I said I knew how Johansson threw his right hand. Rooney said, “Show me,” and I did a very slow-motion version of Ingemar throwing his left and bringing his right hand over it. So Rooney said, “Let’s box.” Well, he was a very little man with very short arms. I would say he was the worst boxer I’ve ever encountered. So we sparred. And, well, I wasn’t going to hit him in the mouth. Then we sat down, and he said, “Let’s spar again, but first let’s have a martini.” I replied, “It’s ten thirty in the morning.” He said, “I know, but martinis are great before lunch.” That was how it went. Every time I said, “Let’s go to work,” he would find some excuse not to. He had to go somewhere, see someone. He was never willing or able to look at his life the way I wanted him to, and he never took the book seriously. So, finally, I got out of Los Angeles. I wrote the book the best I could with zero cooperation and moved on.

  I resolved that I would never again collaborate. I almost kept true to that—until I was offered a ton of money to collaborate with Pete Rose. I was facing some unexpected family expenses, so I ended up taking the Rose deal. The first person I collaborated with, Mickey Rooney, went bankrupt. That was then. But now the documented story of Mickey Rooney is being told in full in this book by Bill Birnes and Rick Lertzman, probably the first book to tell the real truth about one of the greatest talents in film and one of the most complicated human beings I ever met.

  Roger Kahn is the author of The Boys of Summer.

  Introduction by Jeanine Basinger

  Mickey Rooney had talent to burn, and he burned it. He lived a long and often messy life, going up and down the ladder of success as if it were a department store elevator. He did everything there was to do in show business: vaudeville, radio, nightclubs, theater, television, and of course movies, where he ranked at the top of the box office in 1939, 1940, and 1941. He could perform both comedy and drama equally well, and he did impressions of everyone from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Carmen Miranda. He sang, he danced. He played the piano, the drums, and the banjo, and he composed music. He also wrote books, taught acting, spearheaded various business ventures, and served his country during World War II, earning the Bronze Star for performing in combat zones.

  When he died at age ninety-three in April of 2014, Rooney had been working in some form of entertainment for nine decades. Along the way, he won an Emmy, two Golden Globes, and racked up countless nominations for others, including two Oscar bids for Best Actor and two more for Best Supporting Actor. He had also been awarded two honorary Oscars, the first in 1939, for “bringing to the screen the spirit and personification of youth,” and another in 1983, “for his 60 years of versatility in a variety of memorable performances.” The latter award seemed at the time to close the book on Rooney, acknowledging the man who had been performing for more than sixty years. Yet Rooney carried on for another three decades. He died with his boots on, leaving behind small roles in two unreleased movies: Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb (2014) and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (2015).

  Rooney’s success is a unique American tale. He wasn’t necessarily the type for box office stardom. Standing only a little more than five feet, two inches tall, with a boyish face, a shock of untamable hair, and a sort of “gosh, darn” demeanor, he might have been limited to a brief career or no career at all, but his prodigious talent transcended his limitations. He proved to be a performance Everyman who could play a wide variety of roles: a maniacal Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935); a heartbreaking Western Union messenger who delivers the World War II telegrams that announce the deaths of young soldiers in The Human Comedy (1943); the roustabout jockey who helps an adolescent Elizabeth Taylor ride to victory in National Velvet (1944); the down-on-his luck drummer in the underrated The Strip (1951); a doomed GI in The Bold and the Brave (1956); the psychopathic killer in Baby Face Nelson (1957), which won him the French César Award; a sympathetic boxing trainer in Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962); the elderly and sensitive horseman of Black Stallion (1979); and the mentally handicapped man in the TV movie Bill (1981). Even the horror of his now-politically incorrect Mr. Yonioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) is somehow fascinating. Yet even without any of these standout roles, Mickey Rooney would be an important part of film history.

  If he had made only musicals with Judy Garland or just his sixteen-movie series as Andy Hardy, he’d still be famous. Rooney and Garland were young and hopeful together, and the wow factor of the energetic talent they unleash in such movies as Babes in Arms (1939) and Girl Crazy (1943), among others, is unparalleled. Rooney said, “Judy and I were so close we could’ve come from the same womb,” and this instinctive sympathy, rhythmic harmony, and mutual survival skills infuse all the numbers they perform. They sing i
t sweet and they sing it hot, but they are always amazing. And as to his embodiment of Andy Hardy, Rooney is immortal.

  Despite the fact that he was chasing girls, gambling, drinking, and carousing off-screen while he made films, on-screen Rooney perfectly captures the spirit of an American teenager of the late 1930s and early 1940s. Andy Hardy is often called a fantasy figure, the imaginary kid MGM envisioned to goose up its box office receipts. The character is far more honest and believable than that, or else the low-budget series built around him would never have lasted. There may be hokeyness in the Hardy family stories, but there’s also something audiences recognized as true, and that truth was in Mickey Rooney’s performance.

  With so many well-remembered film roles across so many decades, it makes one wonder why Mickey Rooney wasn’t more respected in his elder years. For Rooney, there was no Kennedy Center Honors award, no American Film Institute Life Achievement Award, and certainly no luxurious retirement to a villa in Switzerland. (He left only eighteen thousand dollars in his estate.) The older Rooney was always just a little bit over the top, lacking what Hollywood thought was class. He went bankrupt, became addicted to sleeping pills, and ran up gambling debts. He incited lawsuits, quarreled with his family, and often gave crazy interviews that went way beyond what could be labeled as merely eccentric. Most spectacularly of all, he married a legendary (and tacky) eight times. (“Always get married in the morning,” he was quoted as saying. “That way if it doesn’t work out, you haven’t wasted the whole day.”) These very public peccadillos no doubt kept him off the A-list of Hollywood legends—except, of course, where it counted: in the history books and in the hearts and memories of his fans.

  A book that tells Mickey Rooney’s full story and puts his life and work in proper perspective has been long overdue, and Bill Birnes and Rick Lertzman have done the job. They don’t ignore the embarrassing parts of Rooney or his tragedies and failures, but they emphasize the Mickey Rooney that counts: the one who was first, last, and always a performer who never let his audience down. Birnes and Lertzman understand Rooney, presenting him as a colorful American guy who had it all, lost it all, and regained it all, but no matter what, never gave up. It’s the story of a true professional, and a great read by anyone’s standards.